Meet "Beam"; The Fastest Blockchain with Privacy & Scalability

Introduction

With the invent of blockchain technology, and with more tokens, altcoins, users, exchanges, investors, and startups involved now than ever, scalability and privacy are becoming very serious issues. Users and investors want their information to remain private without being shared with an unsolicited party. With transaction data piling up, the current blockchain system is beginning to lag behind under its own weight. But if cryptocurrency is to be fully adopted globally as a meduim of exchange and perhaps exceed fiat currency in use, it must be prepared for the billions of transactions it must support, accommodate and securely process.

Up until now, there has not been a perfect solution to the limitations of bitcoin. Beam Project is bringing scalability and anonymity for transactions. As we proceed, we will consider the problems of current cryptocurrencies, and various solutions which Beam blockchain is bringing to make crypto transactions overcome their present limitations.
Blockchain has many areas where it is being tested. Few areas include Computing, Data storage, Medicine, Digital Payment Processing, Automotive Markets, etc. This increasing sectors makes it necessary for the technology to meetup with increasing demands.
Bitcoin is a ground breaking concept but has a major shortcoming with respect to private transferring of assets in a peer to peer fashion, and speed of transaction processing.
Beam is the solution to bitcoin's and altcoins' limitation, offering true anonymity as well scalable(faster) peer-to-peer transactions.

About The Beam Project

Beam is a true anonymous and scalable store-of-value coin while maintaining the benefits of an immutable and incorruptible blockchain system such as Bitcoin. Features of Beam include:

User Privacy by default: The user has absolute control over transaction data available, allowing the option of transparency as well as privacy

Mimblewimble Technology: Beam has smaller blocks than any other blockchain, giving it maximum scalability. It’s a faster and more efficient network.

Current Problems/Limitations With Crypto coins

(a) Lack of Privacy of User Information:
Information such as user address and amount of coins transferred ought to be kept private. Users would prefer them private. Though bitcoins claims to protect users information, it is still possible to access them. So bitcoin is not truly private. Research shows that leaks can happen through OTC deals, exchanges, collecting and clustering the blockchain data. It is then possible to deanonymize users, and since all data, including transaction amounts, is open and permanently stored in a public ledger, once users identity is known, all their transactions past and future as well as their balance, become directly linked to them as a person.

(b) Slower Transaction Rate (Low Scalability):
Bitcoin requires processing of every transaction in a block. Having to go through an entire history of transactions will definitely make bitcoin transactions slower.

(c) Higher Transaction Fees :
As miners will always go for the higher transaction fees, it makes the transaction fees for bitcoin higher, especially when the network is heavily loaded. Beam has overcome this prevailing problem. Any currency with high transaction fees will not be the first choice of users. So, this problem mostly affects the currency users who are the major stakeholders.

(d) Sustenance of Value:
Bitcoin is not backed with any asset. However, Beam is backed with Treasury. This will try to ensure the value is sustained and fight the negative effects of volatility.

The Solution

In August 2016, an anonymous author published a new protocol, suggesting an elegant approach to the topic of efficient confidential blockchain. The approach was called MimbleWimble. The approach builds upon two concepts originally proposed by Greg Maxwell, namely Confidential Transactions and Transaction Cut - Through.

1. Confidential Transaction:

Confidential transactions are implemented by using cryptographic commitment scheme which has two basic properties namely hiding and binding. It is similar to giving someone a closed safe box with some message(s) inside that only you know the combination for. In due time, you can reveal the key and the person can make sure that your commitment is valid (binding) while he can not know what it was before the key is received (hiding).

MimbleWimble concept utilizes a well known commitment scheme called Pedersen Commitment that achieves this using Elliptic Curve Cryptography with the formular

C = r * G + v*H

Where r is a blinding factor, a secret key hiding the real value v and G & H are generator point on a specific elliptic curve

2. Transaction Cut-Through:

A large list of transactions in a block can be thought as one transaction to be cut-through. In application, this concept creates a system that only needs the current state of transactions instead of the entire history of all transactions as they occurred, as opposed to bitcoin that require the entire history of all transactions.

"With this system, unspent transactions outputs (a transaction received by a user which has persisted in the blockchain) can be proved to belong to the receiving user via the value of the message and the value of the blinding factor. After creating the transaction, only the commitment is recorded on the blockchain; not the addresses of the users or the amounts exchanged."

3. Scalability:

The “cut-through” feature of Mimblewimble helps to avoid excessive computational overhead. This makes magnitude of Beam blockchain orders smaller than any other blockchain implementation at present.

4. Sustainability:

Beam is open source, implemented from scratch by c++ developers, community-governed, and backed by the Beam Growth Pool in which 20% of block mining rewards goes to this pool to provide incentives for development and promotion of Beam.

5. Usability:

Beam project provides a wallet for desktop and mobile devices, designed to support day-to-day usage for both individual and small business users. The implementation of Beam solutions is also cost-friendly.

6. Compatibility:

A proven Equihash algorithm was implemented for Beam to ensure broad adoption by existing GPU miners. Beam comes with an extensive set of tools for running and managing mining nodes.

BEAM Comparison with Other Coins Promising User Privacy

Advantages of Beam Coin in Summary

Users have complete control over their privacy - user decides which of their information will be available and to whom, having complete control over his personal data in accordance to his will and applicable laws.

Confidentiality without penalty - with Beam confidential transactions do not cause bloating of the blockchain, avoiding excessive computational overhead or penalty on performance or scalability while completely concealing the transaction values.

No trusted setup is required

Blocks are mined using Equihash Proof-of-Work algorithm. This is loved by GPU miners.

Limited emission using periodic halving with total amount of coins supply of 210 million

No addresses is stored in the blockchain - no information whatsoever about the either sender or a receiver of a transaction is stored in the blockchain.

Beam supports many transaction types such as escrow transactions, time locked transactions, atomic swaps and more.

No premine. No ICO. Backed by a treasury, emitted from every block during the first five years.

Implemented from scratch in C++ by a team of professional developers

Beam Coin Specifications & Information

Total Supply - 210 Million

No Premine

No ICO (Initial Coin Offering)

Backed By A Treasury

Emitted From Every Block During The First Five Years

Blocks are mined using Equihash Proof-of-Work Algorithm

Developed From Scratch with C++ By A Team of Developers

Beam Use-Cases

Case 1

Smith is the Manager of Borg Financial Services AG; an investment firm that helps their clients with investments. They have been around cryptocurrencies. Some of their clients would prefer investing in promising coins (but with Anonymity, i.e. privacy of information). Previously, most Altcoins don't offer this privacy advantage.

Smith learns about Beam. Now, those clients with Privacy Preference can invest in a promising crypto currency and still enjoy safety.

Case 2

McPence Legal & Finance Company is a legal, real estate and financial services company. They decide to pay salaries and commissions of their marketers and employees with cryptocurrency for security reasons. They have been using Bitcoin but have not achieved the privacy of information they desire. Now, they learn of Beam Coins, which is built to provide the user with choice of privacy of data. They switch to using Beam Coins to pay the commissions and salaries of their staff and marketing officers. No matter how much is involved, they remain private.

Application Areas

1. Escrow Services:

Beam will support escrow services without hassles. Deposits will reflect in much less time.

2. e-Commerce:

Online purchase of downloadable products would need faster transaction processing. Beam will support e-commerce payments as transactions are faster.

3. Time locked transactions:

Timelock is a smart contract that restricts the spending of some cryptocurrency until a specified future time. Beam supports implementation of Timelock.

4. Atomic Cross-Chain Trading (Atomic swaps ):

Beam can be used to facilitate conversion between cryptocurrencies without a centralized third-party system.

5. Real-Time Mobile Payments Processing:

Since Beam supports faster transactions, Real Time Mobile payments Services can implement Beam as a major payment currency.

Conclusion

In order to encourage greater participation in cyptocurrency, it is necessary to have faster transaction rates and choice of privacy of transactions and users data. If cryptocurrency must be a widely accepted and lasting future money, the previous limitations must be overcome. Cryptocurrency must have scalability and privacy that surpasses or equals the systems of fiat currencies, without compromising on security.

Beam has brought a solution which bitcoin had not brought yet. Transactions will now be much faster than ever before. Most users would love to store their assets in cryptocurrencies as Beam Coins.